Harry Cook – wildflower planting in our area

Harry Cook, Thompson & Morgan trial panel member, and his wife Pat are members of It’s Your Neighbourhood with Loughborough in Bloom and look after the area called ‘The Green Belt’ around their house. Here Harry writes about the wildflowers that they’ve been planting.

Wildflower planting in The Green Belt

Last year was the year of the wildflowers for Britain In Bloom and Charnwood Borough Council ‘Green Spaces Access To Nature’ planted up large areas of wildflowers around the town. These areas were sprayed with a specifically-targeted non-residual weed killer and then rotavated. Voluntary groups then sowed the seeds and raked them in – we had a wonderful display for the RHS judges to see. At the end of the year the plants were mown and left for the seeds to drop and then raked off.

Planting wildflowers

The Green Belt area by our house also had areas sown with wildflowers last year. It was mown in autumn for the seeds to drop and in spring this year l over-sowed the area by slitting the ground with a Sisis pierce. This made it easy to sow the seeds, which l mixed with dry sand then raked in with as little ground disturbance as possible. All seeds are up and looking good. We have also planted foxgloves among the wildflowers and at the side a brook that runs through the park we have a large area of ransom (wild garlic) with lovely white flowers.

Rebecca works in the Marketing department as part of the busy web team, focusing on updating the UK news and blog pages and Thompson & Morgan’s international website. Rebecca enjoys gardening and learning about flowers and growing vegetables with her young daughter.

1 Comment

Sue dolan
on October 26, 2015 at 8:50 pm

Harry cook certainly knows his wild flowers, we have seen the mentioned areas in Loughborough, and they have looked stunning